


I Am Nearly 80% Certain The First Lady Is A Robot

by HigharollaKockamamie



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: External Gazer, Gen, Listicle, Number 3 Will Shock You, canon AU, possibly the first fanfiction to include a picture of the "don't tase me bro" guy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-14 05:21:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9163966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HigharollaKockamamie/pseuds/HigharollaKockamamie
Summary: Behind the dignified glamour of Mr. and Mrs. Sears lies a past shrouded in shadow. But the three things that thrive in darkness are slime molds, anglerfish, and journalists. Gary McGolden reporting.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seifukughost](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seifukughost/gifts).



> For the Xmas Supply Drop prompt, "Solidus/Mei Ling, because you’re all ungrateful children that never played mgs2 snake tales."

** I Am Nearly 80% Certain The First Lady Is A Robot **

By Gary McGolden

 

As attentive readers may recall, there were hints embedded in last month's report _Does The Loch Ness Monster Have Cancer?_ that I had struck on the trail of something big. These clues were to serve as breadcrumbs for you to follow yourselves in the event that I was lost while hunting down this potentially explosive truth. However, with no small help from fortune and the Washington DC public transportation system, I have made it back to my office in one piece, though somewhat bruised and charged with residual electricity.

Though the resulting report may be diluted by the irrelevant pictures and captions inserted by my editor here at Cracked, I assure you the contents are as serious and real as the threat posed to our nation's well-being. My investigations have lead me to the inescapable conclusion that the charming young lady wed to our President has not a mother but a motherboard. Pure solder runs in her 9600 baud veins, and I intend to prove it.

I give to you the evidence for your own judgment, collected at great risk and presented in the mandated format.

 

** #5. WE KNOW NOTHING ABOUT WHERE SHE CAME FROM **

Who is Mei Ling Sears?

Well, you say – I know you're saying it – she's the lovely First Lady, a data analyst of Chinese-American descent.

Is she?

To start with, I did a little digging into her background at MIT and in the Air Force, and got the same result each time: nothing.

“That's confidential.”

“Those records have been sealed.”

“Who did you say you are again?”

“Sir, there's only so much we here at Radio Shack can help you with.”

After hours of fruitless efforts, I put the phone down and eased my jangled nerves with a bite of cold pizza smeared with peanut butter. Where some would see a dead end, I saw a web of leads tangling out into the horizon.

While it's understandable that someone in her position wouldn't be an open book, these are documents that are meant to be open to the public. MIT isn't some fly-by-night establishment, either; unlike President Sears' stint doing charity work in Africa, this lack of a papertrail can't be explained by poor record-keeping. Even her maiden name is unknown. What it looks like more than anything is that one day, she just appeared from thin air like a UFO. She, however, isn't just here to build the pyramids.

She also doesn't keep a UFO's careful distance from humanity. She's friendly to the point where someone with a finely-tuned sense for human interaction might sense overcompensation for a hardware heart. Take the way we see her with her husband. The first couple's lovey-dove nature has always appeared too good to be true. Who can see these two holding hands all throughout a press conference without sniffing something sinister beneath the floral aroma of the Rose Garden? The First Lady is a little too perfect, isn't she?

Like she was made to order.

For these reasons and more too numerous to name, I was lead to suspect that there was something rotten in our nation's capital. There's someone in the Lincoln Bedroom dreaming of electric sheep.

We know her SATs are excellent, but have we seen her Voight-Kampff scores?

 

**#4. EVERYTHING WE DO KNOW ABOUT HER HAS TO DO WITH – YOU GUESSED IT – TECHNOLOGY**

The one thing our First Lady is most famous for is her passion for information science. It's her work, her expertise, her raison – and I would say façon – d'etre.

Here her creators have given themselves away through sheer exaggeration. Hubris! There's no more classic flaw. They've failed to stay within the bounds of the plausible. They say before she was inventing new modes of military communication at an age where most people are inventing new ways to use ramen flavor packets, though once you've figured out the ideal amount of peanut butter to add them to is a half a cup there's only so much farther experimentation can go. Mrs. Sears puts it modestly, but her technical achievements are the one thing there's no lack of documentation for. Those, you can get right at the patent office. Each entry on the shockingly long list drew me closer to the inevitable conclusion.

Her brilliance in the realm of electronic communication is thanks to a homefield advantage.

That's not all. The projects she's taken on while in the White House are all handpicked to represent AI interests. Once you take off the blinders, the true goals are all too obvious. What is her much-vaunted scholarship program for girls studying STEM fields but a plot to raise mechanics to service her bionic brethren? What is her support for public Wifi in rural areas but a foolproof way to ensure the easy spread of orders to D-cell-powered insurgent cells?

 

Proud sponsor of the machine war.

What if the beloved first couple's charm is, in a sense far more literal than we ever thought possible, _calculated_?

**#3. SHE'S CONSTANTLY IN THE COMPANY OF SHADY CHARACTERS**

Now, I hear you saying, if this was true, how could the secret stay hidden? She, a model that appears as a young woman in the bloom of health, can hardly be taken to the “hospital” for convenient “heart problems” like the earlier prototype.

This one doesn't get an article because it isn't even a secret.

My cell phone, you say, can't even go a month without an update. Wouldn't a creation of such complexity require constant service and maintenance?

The conspiracy behind your unreliable iPhone is a lengthy article of its own, but the other question is quite answerable. The simple fact is, she does. It's been going on right under the public's nose.

It's no surprise the White House plays host to a teeming swarm of high-placed humanity, but when you look at the mass of senators, press, security, sycophants, assistants, resistance, strategists, dignitaries, plenipotentiaries, advisers, propagandists, opportunists, lobbyists, hobbyists, and whatever James Carville is, they all have one thing in common; they all have a name and a purported reason to be there. Even the ones with little reason to be around quite as much as they are, like the Marine Commandant's striking wife who's made such close friends with the First Couple, have something down on paper that gets them in the door. But there are those who are nameless. No one has ever offered credentials for the mustached man with the ponytail seen bending the President's ear. The lithe man with the goatee is no Eastern European Ambassador registered with the service. And who is the fat bald man often visible lifting a wine glass in the background of so many gala photos, and why is he never identified in the Associated Press captions? The closer you look, the more the mysteries multiply.

I propose to you that her chumminess with this unsavory cabal is only partly chalked up to being a good hostess, and further explained by the unavoidable conclusion: they are an elite squad of hypercompetant programmers. They are her retinue.

What? Yes, of course they don't look like it, that's the point. Jesus, keep up.

Pictured: the government.

But they're doing more than just keeping her wiring intact and her gyroscopes spinning. This goes far beyond the White House's walls.

**#2. INFORMATION ABOUT HER VANISHES FROM THE INTERNET**

This is where my investigations came, by necessity, out of cyberspace and into all the chill and vulnerability of the real world.

You see, I went looking for an example of a photo with the above shady character in the background, to put in something useful in the place of at least one of the pictures of kittens or something equally frivolous my editor is sure to pepper into this article. I remembered I had seen an excellent specimen in the article concerning the annual White House Correspondent's Dinner on Wikipedia.

We weren't going to use this picture before, but we sure are now. 

When I checked, the image had been wiped clean. Thinking quickly, I clicked rapidly to the list of recent modifications. There I found no username, but an IP address.

That address lead straight to the White House.

If you should check up on this yourself now, however, you will see it blank as an Etch-a-Sketch well-shaken. Within five minutes, every trace of the edit was gone.

The most cursory glimpse under the rock that is the internet will turn up innumerable wriggling grubs of madman's conspiracy theories about any imaginable personage who has ever set foot on the American stage, and yet, delving into the couple at the heart of this administration nets you nada. Any sources promising Sears secrets lead only to tricks about how to get a better extended warranty on your dishwasher, when everybody knows you never go for the extended warranty. That's how they get you.

Even such fertile ground as the recent quiet bump in defense spending has sprouted only a few staid editorials and nothing at all in the wild garden of public speculation. This I can tell you, my readers, is not the natural state of events. I had no choice but to put the gum of my shoe soles to the ground. I unburied some specialized equipment out from under a pile of old takeout menus, steeled myself, and booked the first flight into the lion's den.

Washington D.C.

**#1. JUST LOOK WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TRY TO INVESTIGATE**

I arrived on a grey and drizzly morning with a notebook in my hand and a scheme in my mind. As tempting as it might be to make camp in an alleyway for a few months to observe the comings and goings in the building and the condition of the color of the sky and then think about Don Quixote for a while, my investigative style demands a more direct approach.

I scouted things out before I made my move. There were the standard black-suited thugs, of course, but I blended in among the tourists who had no idea how near they were to the pitiless gaze of cutting edge technology.

Surrender to the machine lords. While you're at it, see the Smithsonian! 

Once I was able to slip into a secure position in the embrace of the landscaping, I brought out the device I'd snuck past the eyes of the TSA. (And don't let their glazed, bovine demeanor fool you - they have a sinister competence of their own.) Fortunately, a clear sightline wasn't necessary. All I needed was the right range and a little time.

The device in question is a little hand-held wonder sourced from an ingenious military design. It can give you a glimpse of a place's layout and occupants without any of the crassness of x-rays. This version was specially modified to pinpoint large objects with a high metal content, whether or not they happen to be encased in extremely convincing synthetic skin. It functions in all weather and all terrain, including huddled in the dirt beneath a good thick shrub, ever the friend of the clandestine investigator. The drawback is that it, like a good cup of coffee or the end of the Pleistocene Era, takes time.

I was just settling in when the device's cheerful boot-up sounds were cut through with a, “Hey! You!” This being an address I happen to be familiar with, I took the usual countermeasures of hunkering down and hurrying up. I had the essential processes started and a helpful SCAN 2% COMPLETE gazing up at me when the bush gave an ominous rustle. I was quick enough to shove the device in my coat pocket, but that came at the expense of being caught by the hand that plunged into my shelter and rudely grasped. Always protect your equipment.

That arm hauled me out to face a pair of huge men barely contained by black suits. They wore tell-tale earpieces and black glasses, and demanded to know who I was and what I was up to. Now, to most people this would be intimidating, but what I was trembling with was excitement. Running into opposition from standard-issue thugs like this is exactly how you know you're on the trail of something big. I also happen to know that these types have a programming that's as set as the one running the automaton in question. I presented my journalist credentials and inquired whether I was being detained. They didn't seem to understand that last part, so it took some repeating at volume.

I could feel the scanning device humming in my pocket. The important thing was to keep them talking long enough for it to do its job, but neither of them looked to be in a chatty mood. I knew things were going downhill when one reached to his own hidden device. I leapt back, then nearly laughed aloud when I saw what he pulled out was nonlethal.

Fun fact: this guy is now the CEO of Viacom.

“We're going to have to ask you to leave the premises,” said Suit A, wielding the stungun at me.

I said, “I'm going to have to refuse.”

The electric kiss hit me first. Then the ground got jealous and took its turn. What stung more than the voltage was the ominous crunch I felt against my torso.

Hoping against hope that that had just been one of the ribs I wasn't using much anyway, I struggled to my feet.

“How is he up already?” came from Suit B.

“You think I haven't been tazed before?” I spat in contempt. These goons always underestimate those who live by the pen.

Suffice it to say I made my escape. When I was in the clear, I dared to take a look at the precious equipment. A glance confirmed my worst fears: the poor thing was smashed. I didn't indulge in despair. I ferried the wreckage to my hotel, ignored the housekeeper's judgmental gaze at the layer of leaves and mud I happened to be wearing, and when I was safely behind the room's locked door, dug through for what could be salvaged.

At last, luck – the memory card was intact. I plugged it into my laptop and mumbled a prayer to the spirit of Edward R. Murrow that the suits' posturing had bought it time to finish the scan.

The image that appeared on my screen was incomplete and dotted with pixilated zones like the marks of tiny electronic grenades. There's not much in the way of detail even at the best of times. What you get is a rough outline of shape and size.

The damage from the device's rough treatment had left the figure distorted, making it appear headless, oversized, and with a pair of curving noodle-like projections coming from the back. But the essential shape was unmistakable, and made my blood go cold as motor oil.

The evidence was in my hand. Somewhere, deep in the White House, there is something humanoid made entirely of metal.

DON'T DATE ROBOTS!


End file.
